Collecting commonsense experiences

Abstract

Humans naturally share knowledge by telling stories. This is a form of knowledge exchange we engage in right from early childhood, and over time we learn to recall, order and organize our experiences as stories [1]. In this paper we describe the Open Mind Experiences (OMEX) system, a web-based knowledge acquisition tool that exploits our natural ability to tell and explain stories in order to build a large-scale commonsense knowledge base. We built OMEX to gather descriptions and explanations of everyday, 'common sense' experiences from volunteer contributors distributed across the Internet. We first describe the results of our previous attempt to collect commonsense knowledge from the general public, the Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS) project. The OMCS project focused on collecting largely assertional commonsense knowledge, and we describe some of its products and spin-offs. We then give several motivating reasons for why we now wish to collect more script-like knowledge. We then explain the features of the new OMEX site and give an evaluation of system based on a preliminary user study. We conclude by discussing our future directions.